Creating Task List Templates

So, it is clear that Bike Company will benefit from SAP Advanced Financial Closing, but we need to understand how it works so that we can best utilize it.

The solution identifies each closing activity required for closing as a task, so for example running the asset depreciation or the foreign currency valuation of open receivables is a task.

You model and plan the financial close tasks of your entity by creating and editing task list templates. Templates depict the closing structure of your company organization and the business organization of the financial close.

You use the templates to generate the actual task list which is the actual closing plan for a specific financial closing.

The video below illustrates this:

Thankfully, SAP provides ready task list models; content delivered with the solution that comprises mandatory and optional closing activities for various roles and subledgers, such as general ledger accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, asset accounting, and controlling. We can copy and modify this delivered content to prepare our own task list templates according to our needs.

In the following video, you can see how to create a task list template in the system using the Manage Closing Task Lists app.

Some of the key components required to create a task list template include:

• Template ID: This is a unique identifier for the template.
• Owner: The user or group that owns the template and manages it.
• Responsible: The user or group responsible for the progress of the task list during the financial close.
• Time-Zone: Generally, the time-zone of the entity for which the template is created.

After creating the template, we need to define the closing structure, this process is detailed in the video below:

Communication systems are used for the outbound communication of a cloud application to a remote system. The connection to your financial back-end system is set up by your system administrator.

When you add communication system folders to your task list template, you can take over organizational information and use system-specific parameters. You can add multiple communication systems to one task list template or task list. This allows you to conduct your financial close with a single task list across the systems contained in the task list.

After creating the closing structure, we need to assign a task list model, this can be either one delivered by SAP, or one we have created. The process is detailed in the following video:

You can assign either only one or multiple task list models to a folder. Additionally, you can assign task list models to several folders of the same communication system in one go.

When we have created our task list template, we can then make changes to task attributes as needed. Check the video to see how it's done:

A task with the task type job can be edited by changing parameters we are allowed to as seen in the video:

We can further customize out template by adding own folders and adding tasks to them. You can check how this is done in the video:

When we are done defining the task list template, we must generate the task list in order to use it to perform the financial close.

A consistency check will be triggered in the background when you try to generate a task list if one of the following conditions holds:

• Current consistency check status is Failed or Check Required.
• Current consistency check status is Successful or Successful with Warnings, but it was set more than two weeks ago.

• A check for consistency identifies the following issues with user assignments:

  • For tasks with approval type Completed Approval Required or Pending Approval Required, it checks for missing assignments of users responsible or responsible user groups.

  • For tasks of the type Job for which the Automatically or Automatically When Due start mode is selected, it checks for missing assignments of processing users or user groups.

• The check for consistency also identifies organizational unit folders with missing organizational unit assignments. Organizational unit relationships need to be valid. That means that organizational unit assignments on lower hierarchy levels need to be related to the organizational units assigned on a higher organizational unit folder level.